Research Interests:

Bio:

Michael McGuffin is an Associate Professor
in the
Department of Software and IT Engineering
at ETS
in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
ETS is the "École de technologie supérieure",
a French-language engineering school
within a provincial network of institutions called the
University of Quebec.
Along with his master's and PhD students,
Michael conducts research in information visualization
and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
He has published four papers cited more than 100 times each, and in 2009,
his paper at the IEEE Information Visualization Conference (InfoVis 2009)
received an Honorable Mention.
He has also served during multiple years on the program committee for IEEE InfoVis.
Previously, Michael
was a post-doctoral researcher at the
Ontario Cancer Institute,
working on visualizations and user interfaces for bioinformatics,
within Dr. Igor Jurisica's lab.
He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science
at the University of Toronto,
where his homebase was the
Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP) lab,
and where his advisor was
Prof. Ravin Balakrishnan.
During his Ph.D. studies, he spent three years as an
IBM CAS Fellowship Student
at the IBM Toronto Lab.
He also holds a Master of Science (M.Sc.)
in Computer Science from University of Toronto,
and an Honours Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.)
in Computer Engineering with Software Engineering Option
from the University of Waterloo.
Prior to his graduate studies,
he worked as a software developer, creating user interfaces
at Alias|wavefront in Toronto
and Discreet Logic in Montreal
(both companies now part of Autodesk),
and CAE in Montreal.
Michael hails from
Chibougamau,
Quebec, Canada;
enjoys living in a trilingual household;
and dabbles in karate.
Publications, video demonstrations, and other information are at
http://profs.etsmtl.ca/mmcguffin/.

Congratulations to François Cabrol for getting
his paper about GenSession accepted
at CMMR 2013 !

Congratulations to Jean-François Im for getting his paper
about VisReduce accepted
at BigDataVis 2013 !

Congratulations to Jean-François Im and Sébastien Rufiange for each getting
papers accepted at IEEE InfoVis 2013 !
Also, congratulations to Shrey Gupta for getting his poster accepted
at the same event !

May 2013: several of us configured our smartphones to track our GPS position over one month,
to generate movement data for a research project.
To create interesting meeting events in the data that we collected, in addition to having regular research meetings at ETS,
we also met for some group restaurant meals (purely for research purposes, of course).

Summer 2013: we welcome two summer interns, Céline Pelletier and Anirban Mukherjee, to the lab!

October 2012 (images below): A HIFIV brainstorming session around the user interface of
a prototype zoomable whiteboard application that uses novel multitouch radial menus.
Three instances of the prototype were running to be played with:
one on a 32-inch 3M multitouch display,
and two more on 10-inch Android tablets.
The prototype was itself used to sketch alternative user interfaces (and food)
during brainstorming.

September 2012 (image below): We visited iBurger
for lunch, to try out their touch screen tables for ordering.

Winter 2012: Undergraduate students in McGuffin's course prototype several multitouch musical instruments,
as well as visualizations of a network of influences between over 600 musicians and musical groups.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yH9ifBvK6o

March 2010: Roberto Lopez-Hernandez and Mike McGuffin travel to Taipei, Taiwan
to present their paper at PacificVis 2010.

Winter term, 2010:
as an assignment in LOG745,
undergraduate students
design and prototype simple multitouch applications.
Click on the image below for an enlarged version.

February 2010 (images below): 1920×2160 pixel, 37×42 inch (56 inch diagonal) multitouch surface
(made with two 1920×1080 pixel, 42 inch displays),
designed and built by Christophe Viau (a Ph.D. student supervised by Mike McGuffin)
and Jean-François Lahos,
and purchased by our department
to be used in teaching and research.

December 2009:
Roberto Lopez-Hernandez has been working hard developing a volume renderer in C++ with a GLSL fragment shader.
Click on the image below for an enlarged version.

October 2009:
Sébastien Rufiange travels to France to present his paper at
IHM 2009
and also visits the Aviz visualization lab.
Congratulations, Sébastien!

Winter term, 2009:
as an assignment in LOG740,
undergraduate students
modify a simple First-Person Shooter game,
written in C# by Martin Poirier,
that uses a Wiimote as the input device.
Click on the image below for an enlarged version.

Message to English-speaking students:

If you're interested in doing a Ph.D. with me,
there are ways this could be done without
you having to take any courses in French,
allowing you to conduct all your research
in English and write your thesis in English.
Examples of potential research projects
include:

browsing 3D volumetric data

visualization and manipulation of graphs / networks

interfaces for artistic creation

the use of animation for smooth transitions in user interfaces

visualization of music

new interactive approaches for virtual desktops (example: working in a 3D space)